iFlicks review from iflicksapp.com by Jeff from New Hampshire helps you get your videos into the right categories in iTunes. I review the Fire TV Stick from Amazon (spoiler, I like it!) Donald Burr brings us his review of the Epson LabelWorks LW-600P App-enabled, Portable Label Printer. I tell the story of the trials and tribulations of trying to leave my current Domain registrar to go over to Hover (see the shownotes to get a coupon code for 10% off). Don’t forget to use the Amazon Affiliate link in the left sidebar at podfeet.com for your holiday shopping! George from Tulsa reviews 3 Android devices: The Nvidia Shield Tablet, the Amazon Fire HD6 Tablet and finally the Amazon Fire Phone (I’m not even going to let you have a link to that one based on George’s review!) In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart takes us back through the beginning of Taming the Terminal Part 25 of n on IP Subnets and then takes it home to the point that I actually understood it!
Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Saturday December 14, 2014 and this is show number 501.
Bart will be back on Chit Chat Across the Pond this week because we really wanted to finish what we started with the whole IP Subnet thing last week. Two reasons I bring it up at the top of the show. First is that Bart regrets that when I asked if he wanted to pause to gather his thoughts he declined the invitation. He regrets it because he feels his explanation was a bit tangly. He will be rectifying that by doing a quick run-through of what we learned last week to clarify things. Secondly I want to tell you up front that while this was the heaviest, most difficult thing Bart has ever tried to explain to me, I stuck with him and in the end I actually understood it!
I want to give you motivation to stay with it too, so I’m going to tell you what he told me near the END of the discussion, and the problem that all of this math will solve for you. You’ll hear me holler at him that he should have told me up front in the recording. Here’s the scenario. You or someone you know has a network set up and some of their devices seem to be able to do things that others can’t. One computer can see a printer, the other can’t. One can share to the AppleTV but the other can’t. If you learn what Bart’s teaching here and follow him through to teaching how to use the cool new IP Subnet Calculator he built, then you might be able to figure out what’s gone wrong, or at the very least eliminate some possible culprits.
That’s a bit of a tease because there’s way more to it than that, but hopefully you’ll be motivated to buckle down and make it through. Hey, if I can follow along, you can too!
I’d like to kick us off here by playing a review from first time contributor Jeffrey from New Hampshire on an app called iFlicks for OSX. I’ve been torturing Jeff for weeks pushing the review out so I’m glad I can finally fit it in! In the middle of the review you’ll be hearing someone talking. I was confused at first until I realized that Jeff was using the VoiceOver screen reader on the Mac, as he’s blind. It’s actually a great representation of how VoiceOver works and how quickly people like Jeff listen to the voice speaking the menus. Ok, enough preamble, let’s hear Jeff.
iFlicks by Jeff from New Hampshire
iFlicks is from http://www.iflicksapp.com/ and lets you put your ripped content into the right folders instead of calling everything Home Movies.
1. Iflicks can be purchased from the mac app store. As I said in my review I have better luck with the original IFlicks rather than the new IFlicks2. YMMV!
2. Once IFlicks is installed, on the first launch it will prompt you to install the quicktime plug-in into system prefs.
3. When using IFlicks for the first time goto preferences.
General prefs: just language and whether you want USA or another countries rating system for movies.
Next is Quicktime prefs: I generally leave these alone.
Third: is iTunes prefs, I check the box saying do not import into iTunes. Finally under iTunes you can set the output folder.
4. When you launch IFlicks there is a toolbar at the top:
The first item is: preset, If your file is in .mp4 or .m4v just use the iTunes compatible setting. Otherwise there are options for apple tv, iPad, and 1080p.
Second item in toolbar is to set output folder which you can also do in IFlicks preferences.
5. Click the add box to add files. Once all your files have been added and IFlicks is ready to proceed just click the start button. The cue window will come up with a clear button. Once you click the clear button and it says 0 videos you’re done!
Notes:
1. If you are processing a whole season of tv shows make sure of the following:
The folder containing the shows is titled “show name, season ?”
And, each episode should have 01, 02, 03 etc. and the episode name. Some shows come down with extraneous stuff like: “season 1, episode 1” this extraneous stuff seems to confuse IFlicks.
2. When processing movies, I usually also remove extra stuff from the file name. (Like blu-ray, xvid, etc) You get better results this way.
Hover
Remember last week I promised that I’d get my domains transferred over to our newest sponsor, Hover? I’m afraid I’m going to welch on that promise, but it’s actually an even better story of why to register your domains with Hover. Let me back up a bit and explain what a domain actually is to the uninitiated. When you create a website, you have to have several pieces put in place. The most important piece is to buy a hosting plan from someone so that your files actually live on a server somewhere on the Internet. There are about a gazillion hosting companies out there and many are quite good. So now you’ve got your website up there on a server, but how do people get to it? They get to it by typing in your domain name, like podfeet.com. In order to use a name like podfeet.com you have to rent it from a domain registrar, and there aren’t that many of those. I say rent because if you don’t pay your yearly fee, someone else can start renting it and you use the name.
Ok, so I have my domain podfeet.com with the other guys, so I want to move it to Hover. With the other guys they charge you extra to have your home address be private. If you’ve ever flown in Europe, it’s like when you book a flight on Ryan Air for something like $12 but then they charge you extra if you want a seat. And oxygen. And to get off the plane later. This hiding of your personal information is called domain privacy. In order to move my domain from the other guys to Hover, I have to temporarily turn off domain privacy. But guess what? The other guys farmed this service out to a third party called Domains by Proxy.
Ok, so how do I get into Domains by Proxy? According my current domain company, they sent me the login information…On November 4th 2006! Ok, reset my account. Nope, can’t do that. You have to talk to Domains by Proxy. But I can’t get INTO them because I don’t even know my account number, much less what email account I was using EIGHT YEARS AGO!
The other guys told me that the only way I could get my login account changed to a current email address was to email a copy of my drivers license or passport to Domains by Proxy, and it would take 24 hours for them to get back to me. Well it’s been more than 24 hours and I’m still waiting.
The good news is that my new little friend Mark from Hover called me because I whined in an email to them about this malarkey and he was very sympathetic and told me in no uncertain terms that when I finally escape the clutches of my previous domain name provider, Hover will NOT have a third party manage my domain privacy, they handle it in house.
Do you see why choosing the right domain hosting company is critical to your sanity??? So stay tuned, I’m sure by next week I’ll be happy and cozy at Hover. If the other guys ever let me go… In the mean time while you wait for the end of my saga, head over to hover.com and use the coupon code XXXXX or just click on the big Hover logo in the right sidebar to get 10% off of YOUR domain hosting!
Blog Posts
Amazon Fire TV Stick Lights it Up
Epson LabelWorks LW-600P App-enabled, Portable Label Printer by Donald Burr
George from Tulsa Reviews 3 Android Devices
Clarify
Remember last week when Barry invited all of us to come to a barbecue at his house this coming summer in Chicago? I talk to him off line and he’s actually serious about this. I suggested that in addition to his website for the event he should have a registration form. I offered to help him create it using Google forms. He sounded interested, and was happy to have the help. Then I realized, that I shouldn’t just fish for him I should teach the man to fish! How do you think I did that? Of course, I flipped open my trusty Clarify and took screenshots as I created the form. It was only a matter of adding a little bit of text here and there, some outlining boxes, and a few arrows, And I had a tutorial for him that I knew he could follow.
I probably spent only around 10 minutes making sure I have the good screenshots and adding all the annotations before I had a nice document I could send on to Barry. If you want to help others (and make them stop badgering you with questions when they forget what you told them), go over to clarify-it.com and check out the free trial of Clarify. You can buy it there, or get it from the Mac App Store if you’d prefer.
Stay tuned here for more information on Barry’s Mac Barbecue – hope to see you in Chicago, even if you do have a 3 month old baby at that time, Stephen.
Chit Chat Across the Pond – Time: 34 min
See Bart’s Blog post for the shownotes For Taming the Terminal Part 25 of n IP Subnets.
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, the makers of Clarify over at clarify-it.com. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter and app.net @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
Loved Loved Loved Loved the iFlicks review. Jeffery needs to do more reviews.
Allison, the Epson label printer actually comes with TWO cartridges, a 1/2-inch “sample length” cartridge (don’t know the exact number of feet) but it also comes with a full retail length 1″ wide cartridge. Those normally run for around $25. So basically you’re getting a ~$25 cartridge (that you would probably want to buy anyway) for free, which brings the effective cost of the unit itself to $75. So yeah, not too shabby.
Enjoyed TTT (as always). There is a small piece of the dialog that may confuse some people because of the imprecise language that many/most “normal” people are accustomed to.
This dialog, which took place when Bart and Allison were discussing traffic internal to a subnet, may cause confusion:
Allison: “I didn’t get the part where you said that it doesn’t have to go through the router at all”
Bart: “No router at all. It just uses arp to get the MAC address and sends the packet directly using Ethernet. And off it goes, and it’s done. There’s no router involved, you can go straight to that guy because he’s on your subnet.”
It’s important to remember, as Bart mentions several times, that the Linksys or Netgear or AirPort device (hereafter referred to as your “network box”) isn’t just a “router” as so many people describe it. It contains three main components: (1) a Wi-Fi access point, (2) an Ethernet switch, and (3) a simple router.
The packets that go between two nodes on your subnet still go through the access point and/or the Ethernet switch components of your “network box” (which are “Layer 1” in the model Bart is using). Bart’s point was that it just doesn’t reach the router (which is the “Layer 2” element) inside the network box.
The “network box” is still involved in the exchange (“A” to “network box” to “B”); it’s not actually a “direct” connection between the two devices on the network.
Steve – this is a really important distinction. I really did think that the information went straight between the two devices. I suppose if the two devices were wired I would have assumed the signal ran down the wire and through the router, but wouldn’t have thought of the switch portion actually being involved. On wifi I definitely assumed the signal would just fly between them.
I put a lot of effort into explaining that home routers are three-in-one devices in the previous instalment, and we definitely re-visited that point when explaining how people can accidentally split their network. The diagrams in this instalment re-enforce the point. I was afraid of repeating myself too much – I guess this is one of those concepts that needs more repetition than average because of just how en-grained the incorrect use of the word ‘router’ now is.
I’ll try remember to keep reminding people that what they call a router is not a router, but that it contains a router component that may or may not be engaged depending on their configuration.
Allison, it is not surprising that someone with the gear that you have might think there’s a direct connection. Wi-Fi has two different (and mutually-incompatible) modes: Infrastructure mode and ad-hoc mode. The former (infrastructure mode) is what you are using on your home network (everyone connects through an access point — hub-and-spoke topology). And you use the latter (ad-hoc) when your iPhone connects to your Wi-Fi enabled SD card in your camera. In ad-hoc mode, devices connect to one-another (point-to-point) without infrastructure.
Not to complicate matters (too late!), but the wired example you gave is actually just like Wi-Fi infrastructure mode. Modern Ethernet (10/100/1000BaseT) is also based on a hub-and-spoke topology, where the network switch serves as the nexus — not actually point-to-point.
With so many moving parts, this topic can get quite confusing!
Oh, and Bart — the figures does a really nice job of showing what I put in words (way) above (your red, “not in use” router does this well). My personal windmill to tilt against is the common terminology, which is why I advocate for the term “network device” instead of “home router.”
I am pretty technical. I managed a PC support area as my day job since the ’80s, I love Bart’s segments, and even my eyes were glazing over this time around.
I hope to be able to come back to the live chat room early next year. One of my podcasts currently records on Sundays, but we are looking to move it to another day in early 2015. I always listen,of course.
Checking out iFlicks now.
I was delighted to hear you mention Orphan Black. I am one of the hosts of an Orphan Black podcast, Clone Dance Party, which is non-spoilery, one of our hosts is watching for the first time.